I see it as being in the causal graph—not as a node, but as an arrow (actually, a whole class of arrows). If I have two stones, and I put two more stones with them, then this will cause me to have four stones. Note that this doesn’t apply in all cases—if I have two piles of sand and I put them together with two more piles of sand, the result is one really big pile of sand and not four piles—but it applies in enough cases that the cases in which it does not apply can be considered exceptions for various reasons.
The problem with this is that something can both be caused and appear in a lot of causal interactions. For example, if I launch a giant mirror into space to block out the sun, all of the arrows from the sun to brightness everywhere have to be changed. In AI, this is often represented using plate notation, where a rectangle (the plate) is drawn around a group of variables that repeat and an arrow from outside the plate effects every instance of the variables in the plate.
I see it as being in the causal graph—not as a node, but as an arrow (actually, a whole class of arrows). If I have two stones, and I put two more stones with them, then this will cause me to have four stones. Note that this doesn’t apply in all cases—if I have two piles of sand and I put them together with two more piles of sand, the result is one really big pile of sand and not four piles—but it applies in enough cases that the cases in which it does not apply can be considered exceptions for various reasons.
The problem with this is that something can both be caused and appear in a lot of causal interactions. For example, if I launch a giant mirror into space to block out the sun, all of the arrows from the sun to brightness everywhere have to be changed. In AI, this is often represented using plate notation, where a rectangle (the plate) is drawn around a group of variables that repeat and an arrow from outside the plate effects every instance of the variables in the plate.